It was a very long minute. The young heiress spent it in gazing abstractedly at the buttons on the coachman’s back, and the rapt expression on her face seemed to tell more of a pleasant day-dream than of serious mental travail. Miss Wilcox was accustomed to these moods which called for silence, and offered no protest. At last Kate spoke, with a tone of affectionate command. “When we get to the house I will give you a book to read, and I want you to finish every word of it before you begin anything else. It is called ‘All Sorts and Conditions of Men,’ and it tells how a lovely girl with whole millions of pounds did good in England, and I was thinking of it all the while we sat there in the shop. Only the mortification of it is, that in the book the rich girl originated the idea herself, whereas I had to have it hammered into my head by--by others. But you must read the book, and hurry with it, because--or no: I will get another copy to read again myself. And I will buy other copies; one for _her_ and one _for him_, and one--” She lapsed suddenly into silence again. The disparity between the stupendous dream out of which the People’s Palace for East London’s mighty hive of millions has been evolved, and the humble project of a sitting-room or two for the factory-girls of a village, rose before her vision, and had the effect of making her momentarily ridiculous in her own eyes. The familiarity, too, with which she had labelled these two strangers, this lawyer and this milliner, in her own thoughts, as “him” and “her,” jarred just a little upon her maidenly consciousness. Perhaps she had rushed to embrace their scheme with too much avidity. It was generally her fault to be over-impetuous. Had she been so in this case? “Of course, what we can do here”--she began with less eagerness of tone, thinking aloud rather than addressing Tabitha--“must at best be on a very small scale. You must not be frightened by the book, where everything is done with fairy prodigality, and the lowest figures dealt with are hundreds of thousands. I only want you to read it that you may catch the spirit of it, and so understand how I feel. And you needn’t worry about my wasting money, or doing anything foolish, you dear, timid old soul!” Miss Wilcox, in her revolving mental processes, had somehow veered around to an attitude of moderate sympathy with the project, the while she listened to these words. “I’m sure you won’t, my dear,” she replied, quite sweetly. “And I daresay there can really be a great deal of good done, only, of course, it will have to be gone at cautiously and by degrees. And we must let old Runkle do the papering and whitewashing; don’t forget that. He’s had ever so much sickness in his family all the winter, and work is so slack.” “Do you know, I like your Mr. Tracy!” was Kate’s irrelevant reply. She made it musingly, as if the idea were new to her mind.